So your organisation is committed to having a positive impact on the world. You and your team have worked hard over the years to build a strategy and embed social value into your daily operations. And, for the most part, you’re reaping the rewards. You’re seeing tangible results for beneficiaries, your reputation is on the rise, and staff are engaged with your causes. This is all great news!
But why stop there?
There’s no such thing as “completing” social value. There will always be ways to broaden your impact and improve your process. But you also don’t have all the time in the world to do that. So today, we thought we’d share three simple hacks to supercharge your social value. All without eating into your precious time and resources.
Sound good? Let’s get started.
Decentralise data capture
Capturing data for activities spanning your entire organisation and wider supply chain is practically a full-time job. Especially if you’re relying on spreadsheets and manual data entry. So much admin is a lot of pressure to put on one person or team’s shoulders when it’s often expected in addition to their usual responsibilities.
Decentralising data capture shifts the responsibility from an individual or team to every single person across your organisation.
It means no one wastes any time chasing colleagues for their latest data. No hunting through spreadsheet after spreadsheet for a specific activity. And no valuable insights slipping through the cracks because one specific person just happened to not be there in the moment to capture them.
Decentralised data capture allows you to collect social value data from any device at any time. It frees up your team’s time as well as increasing the amount of data you collect. With this, you can build a more accurate picture of your progress and make better decisions to keep the momentum going.
Gamification
Decentralising your data capture requires your staff to be on board. They’re going to have to want to log their activities. And what better way to encourage engagement than by embracing some healthy competition?
As people, we love that sense of accomplishment. And gamification features such as leaderboards, pledges, or awards provide exactly this. They serve as mini incentives to keep your staff motivated and inspired to push towards your social value goals.
They can also help boost your impact by encouraging teamwork. You can assign every activity a score. And departments or teams can work together to achieve awards on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Sometimes all it takes is one department getting a shout out for their carpool regime or volunteering efforts for everyone else to up their game.
💡 In action: Gamification features have significantly improved staff engagement with the University of Manchester’s ‘10,000 Actions’ initiative. It challenges all 10,000+ of the university’s staff to perform at least one positive, sustainable action.
Since deploying Impact, staff engagement with the initiative has jumped from 3% to an impressive 55%. Departments can now team up to improve their impact and earn awards. And this means staff are more engaged with the initiative, more activities are being logged, and the university has better oversight of their impact and progress towards sustainable goals.
Customisable dashboards
Social value isn’t just about grand plans and annual strategies. It’s also all the daily decisions you make to tweak interventions and allocate resources. Every single choice adds up. But to make the strongest decisions, you need all the relevant insights.
Customisable dashboards allow you to see the specific data and outcomes you need to keep pushing towards your goals. With so much data being captured on a daily basis, they allow you to cut through the noise and focus only on what’s relevant in the moment.
Whether it’s individual activities, outcomes, locations, or KPIs, you can choose what you see and monitor. There’s no hunting around for relevant graphs or manually comparing the performance of multiple initiatives or locations. It’s all just right there when you need it.
Let’s say you’re generating a report on your organisation’s progress towards net-zero in the North West. You can pull up all the relevant data in a matter of minutes. Then you can save the corresponding KPIs to your dashboard and track the progress on an ongoing basis.
There’s always room to improve our social value efforts. That’s the beauty of it. But you don’t have to do it alone. With the right tools at your disposal, you can supercharge your social value process and make even more of a difference.
With all these features and much more, Impact makes capturing, evaluating, and reporting your social impact simple. It’s one intuitive platform for everything social value. To find out more, schedule a demo, or get in touch with the team on 0161 532 4752.